Share this:

The City Council Transportation Committee headed by James Vacca Photo: Dan Brinzac

In a City Council Transportation Committee hearing last week, Chairman James Vacca got Department of Transportation officials to admit that they have no real clue as to the full impact pedestrian plazas are having on surrounding streets.

The plazas — such as those at Times and Herald squares — seem second only to bike lanes on Department of Transportation chief Janette Sadik-Khan’s anti-automobile agenda.

The eventual goal is to have at least one plaza in every one of the city’s 59 community boards. Fourteen are in the planning stages — at the “request” of locals boards, so the DOT says.

But Vacca asks, “How do we make sure that we’re not just shifting and diverting traffic and that the problem that we had in one spot moves to another? . . . That when we have instituted pedestrian plazas, we have only moved traffic to other surrounding streets?”

DOT officials assert that traffic flow at Times and Herald squares has increased efficiency since the plazas were installed two years ago.

The city also insists that local air quality is improved.

But why believe them?

The agency’s data on this issue, as well as bike lanes, have proven questionable at best — undermined even by its own numbers, to say nothing of independent studies.

One example: the DOT pushes the fact that fatalities are down in areas where plazas are installed — while downplaying the inconvenient fact that total accidents are up.

As for Vacca’s question, DOT officials could only say that it was “extremely hard” to assess the “spillover” effect — e.g., how much businesses on 43rd, 44th and 45th streets and Ninth Avenue may be suffering because of thicker traffic thanks to the Times Square plaza.

No doubt. For there’s scant evidence to suggest that the DOT has ever seriously tried to collect such information.

Vacca wants the DOT to produce real data of the spillover effect for every community board where a pedestrian plaza is to be installed.

Hope he’s not holding his breath; he’ll turn bright blue before the city coughs up the data.

And should it ever do so, he’d do well to double-check every tittle and jot.